Free Republic

Edward M. Kennedy was romantically described as the last lion, but it might be more accurate to think of him as a river. Especially earlier in his long career, he could be tumultuous and overflow his banks, both politically and in his personal life. But mostly he was steady, forceful, and above all persistent. Particularly in the three decades after his failed 1980 presidential bid

Witches are a big deal in Salem's modern culture. The city's association with witchcraft has been capitalized on from films like 1993's "Hocus Pocus" to the annual Halloween festivities that draw in nearly a million visitors throughout the month of October. But something often left out of conversations about the 17th century Salem Witch Trials is that the victims were real people who, along with their families, suffered a great injustice at the hands of their community. A new exhibition at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum is recontextualizing the witch trials from a human perspective: "The Salem Witch Trials: Restoring Justice"....

In the essay, “The Paganization of Biblical Studies,” Dr. Peter Jones, Professor of New Testament at Westminster Seminary in Escondido, Calif., identifies liberalism and/or progressivism as a form of neo-Gnostic occult mystical pantheism.Occult Gnostic pantheism arose among certain Jews during the Babylonian exile so is grounded in Ageless Wisdom Teachings from the time of Babylon.

The first glimpse I ever had of Robert Oppenheimer was in an episode of the landmark British television documentary series The World at War. (Soon to be the topic of this column.) It was in Episode 24 ("The Bomb"), which tells the story of the American nuclear program from its inception to the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer does not play a huge part until they get to the first test of the "Gadget", on July 16, 1945 at the White Sands Proving Grounds, roughly midway between Albuquerque and El Paso. He...

Loot, a despicable word, was evidently among the first few Hindustani expressions to enter the British lexicon. It aptly illustrates the brand of British colonisation like no other word. On a chilly evening in the first week of December in 1862, British Empire’s railway engineer E.B. Harris reached a small riverside market village called Sultanganj on the south bank of Ganges some twenty miles west of Bhagalpur. Here his 4,771 workers were excavating a vast mound of bricks on the hillside to build a railway yard. Harris, recognised among the railway engineers for the construction of the challenging Jamalpur tunnel,...

Pictures feature in Images of War: The Nazis' winter warfare on the Eastern Front, 1941-1945, by Ian Baxter They show the plight of German troops unaccustomed and ill-equipped for the fierce weather conditions Operation Barbarossa began in June 1941 and ultimately ended with Soviet troops' offensive on Berlin Wrapped up against the bitter cold with looks of grim resignation on their faces as they faced a resolute enemy, German troops are seen battling through the harsh Russian winter during their invasion of the Soviet Union. The rare image, taken in the cold months of 1941, is among hundreds which feature...

Hate hoaxes have been rendered obsolete. Now moonbats can experience the world they pretend we live in by entering a virtual reality created by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. It reinforces the increasingly preposterous notion that favored blacks are somehow oppressed: Meta has revealed a virtual “Afrofuturistic world” as part of their celebrations of black history month, allowing users to experience racism virtually while wearing the company’s Oculus headsets. The virtual “I Am A Man” tour was designed by Gabe Gault. “You can go to a museum, you can see artifacts, you can see writings of old history, but it’s one thing...

It is a commonly accepted view in mainstream archaeology that civilization started in ancient Mesopotamia with the great civilization of Sumer in what is now modern-day Iraq. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologists excavating at Tell Al’Ubaid in Iraq made an unusual discovery when they unearthed several 7,000-year-old artifacts which appear to represent humanoid figures with reptilian features. The domestic architecture of the Ubaidians included large T-shaped houses, open courtyards, paved streets, as well as food processing equipment. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art , some of these villages began to develop into towns, temples began...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans are demanding Pres. Biden’s Education Department block a planned history education proposal that invokes the 1619 Project. "Americans do not need or want their tax dollars diverted from promoting the principles that unite our nation toward promoting radical ideologies meant to divide us," McConnell wrote. “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist…the origins of racism cannot be separated from the origins of capitalism. The origins of capitalism cannot be separated from the origins of racism." -- Professor Ibram X. Kendi, Big Kahuna of Critical Race...

Hulu will produce a documentary series based on “The 1619 Project,” stories in The New York Times that examined the legacy of slavery in America dating from the arrival of the first slave ship from Africa. Roger Ross Williams, an Academy Award-winning director for his film “Music by Prudence,” will oversee and produce the series, it was announced Thursday. The announcement was an outgrowth of a deal announced last summer by the Times, Lionsgate and Oprah Winfrey to develop “The 1619 Project” into a portfolio of films, television series and other content. …

Last summer I read an engrossing book entitled "1421: The Year China Discovered America" by Gavin Menzies, a retired British submarine lieutenant commander turned amateur archeologist. The book documented his efforts to demonstrate how a Chinese fleet of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of ships set sail in 1421 and circumnavigated the world, touching base everywhere from the Americas (North and South), Australia, Africa, Greenland, Europe, and all points between. The purpose of the expeditions, according to Menzies, was to chart the waters of the globe, impress and intimidate foreign rulers, and bring the entire world into China's "tribute system." ...during the...

In “Bridgerton,” the new Shonda Rhimes period drama on Netflix, the lords and ladies of early 19th century Britain are depicted as Black as well as White. Why? Washington Post television critic Hank Stuever explains it this way: “A Black character stops to explain, grandly, how and why this society came to be integrated. (Answer: because the queen is a person of color.) Not only does it not make much sense, but it seems like an unnecessary wrench thrown into a completely sensible and revisionary romp: People of color are here because they should have been here all along. Isn’t...

Wikipedia makes the Luddite's as dangerous radicals, when they were not.

Saturday’s news conference with Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll was a little different from usual. For starters, there was no practice to discuss. Carroll had given the team the day off. Second, there were no questions. Just 15 minutes of Carroll addressing the camera, discussing a topic that continues to dominate the sports world: racial inequality. [cut] "(White people) need to be coached up and they need to be educated about what the heck is going on in the world," Carroll said. "Black people can't scream anymore, they can't march any more, they can't bear their souls anymore to...

She also believes that Africans came to the Americas and helped the Olmecs and Aztecs build their civilization but then left peacefully (and never came back?).

The imagery couldn’t be more direct. Across the nation, rioting and unrest that has killed black Americans and destroyed black neighborhoods has included the defacement of historic monuments, including those to abolitionists.The last wave of monument destruction, in 2017, largely focused on Confederates and slave holders, erasing all the accomplishments of figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with a scarlet S, for slave-holder. This time, the ignorance has descended even further.The rioters are now tearing down and defacing memorials wantonly, apparently assuming that if someone is being celebrated that person is “probably a racist,” as the image...

Right now, most of the pitched battles between Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem concerns Jews trying to pray in the vicinity of the spurious Al-Aqsa. I say spurious since any competent historian, with only the must rudimentary knowledge, could dismiss Muslim claims in five minutes or less. The Muslims assert that Mohammed rode al-Buraq -- a mule with the face of a woman -- to Al Aqsa (the Furthest Mosque), in Jerusalem, where from thence, he ascended to heaven. The ascent to heaven is called: al-Miraj, from where we get the word: mirage. A more ridiculous and fantabulous story could...

UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall is no more, its name removed from the law school today (Thursday, Jan. 30), campus officials announced. The denaming — the outcome of a nearly three-year process launched after a Berkeley lecturer discovered the racist writings of John Henry Boalt, a 19th century Oakland attorney — is the first time a Berkeley facility’s name has been eliminated due to its namesake’s character or actions.

Feminist Naomi Wolf’s new book has been canceled by its U.S. publisher after questions of accuracy were raised in Great Britain. Wolf’s dispute with Houghton Mifflin arose after the book “Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love” was published in the U.K. and a BBC interviewer in May challenged her research on sodomy executions in Victorian Britain, according to reports. The book delves into the persecution of homosexuality during that era. […] Wolf, known for such best-sellers as “The Beauty Myth” and “Misconceptions,” has had her scholarship challenged before. In “The Beauty Myth,” she wrote that anorexia caused the...

I was 16 when I saw the news. Matthew Shepard’s murder taught me and many in this country that homophobia kills. Let us honor his life by channeling pain into purpose and striving to build a country where all belong. https://twitter.com/MattShepardFDN/status/1183008667672698881